How to get your personalised email campaigns right

October 18, 2012

At Extravision, as well as seeing the campaigns we produce for our managed service clients, I am also a recipient of the [email protected] address and so see the prospecting email campaigns that come in from people trying to sell to us.

We receive many campaigns to the info@ address that are clever, eye-catching and effective. But as you can imagine we see a lot of poorly executed campaigns as well as plenty of gaffs and errors. We see emails using the BCC field (yes people still do that)! as well as emails with no unsubscribe and even ones where you can see the HTML code only and not the visual email it was supposed to produce.

A lot of the emails we get are attempts at a more personalised, one to one, style of email. Particularly in the field of B2B email marketing many people know that they are an effective tool in eliciting a response from a company. They are very useful for surveys, lead generation and events amongst other types of campaigns. But the margin for error is very small and to get it right and hit the response jackpot is an art form. Below are some tips that might help in constructing the perfect email.

Don’t try to combine personalised and visual styles. This means avoiding putting logos or images at the top of the email: Make the email look like something you sent personally.

Not too long A personalised email is not the place for your entire company history. Keep it short and sweet.

No bullet points People will switch off if you list things and you should use text to get your point across succinctly. Also avoid bullets and italics.

Offer one call to action only Stick to one simple and clear response for the recipient. If you offer too many, the reader will be confused and will do nothing.

Obviously what is good and bad can be very subjective in an email campaign but we generally find that following the rules above and keeping it simple and authentically personal can produce some great replies - and hopefully some good leads.